Month: January 2018

Emergency services have been heavily represented in Tomica toys for a long time especially police and fire departments, always popular with kids. After countless classic red fire department vehicles TakaraTomy is trying something new and original with this 22nd Kuji collection.

This time the cars will carry the colors of fire fighters uniforms from different groups of the Tokyo Metropolitan Fire Department.

A-one Fire Unit

The A-one Fire unit are experts in dealing with extreme fires of highly flammable materials (oil, tires) or in confined space (subway, factories). They use top of the line equipment.

Ladder Corps

Suzuki Escudo; Nissan Fairlady Z; Mitsubishi Triton; Toyota Voxy.

The Ladder Corps has the difficult task to reach fires in high locations such as tall buildings. Ladder trucks operators in particular need to quickly put their vehicle in the right position for the fire fighters to be able to intervene in the smallest amount of time possible.

Volunteer Fire Corps

Mercedes-Benz Unimog.

The Fire Brigades are composed of part-time fire fighters and volunteers in small or remote locations that do not have a proper Fire Department nearby. They are trained to deal with many situations such as fires, floods and rescues and have the tough task to handle major events until better equipped professionals arrive.

This collection is definitely a smart and fun way to teach the different roles and careers opportunities in fire departments to the young generation. And we get cool looking Tomicas on top of that !

The 22nd Kuji Fire Fighters Collection will be released on March 17th in Japan.

Many versions of the BMW M3 E30 are already available in Tarmac’s Hobby64 line, offering quite a rainbow of racecar colors. All these iconic liveries are flawlessly scaled down to these 1/64 replicas in an impressive display or precision and accuracy.

The interior is very detailed as well, with harnesses on the seats, a complete rollcage and even a painted gear stick. On that note, the rollcage seems to be a bit lower than it should be. That’s probably due to the construction of the model itself, working at such a small scale is not leaving much room to cram many things inside.

It is worth mentioning that the plain white version features a passenger seat, where all the race car versions accurately have the driver seat only.

On the outside, the Mobil 1 car has an antenna while all the others don’t. According to the few pictures of the real cars we could find on Google it seems accurate as well.
The wheels are once again beautiful, it is fair to assume by now that Tarmac will never disappoint on that aspect. The front lights could have been nicer with a little more care. Tomytec did it better on their 318 and 325.

The pictures speak for themselves : these E30 are just great ! Missing from this review is the newly released orange Jagermeister DTM version that look awesome.

And more are coming with emblematic liveries : FINA, Marlboro, Advan, Falken, Michelin, Bastos and even TicTac !

Exciting to see this car finally get a proper 1/64 release. Overall very nice model featuring gorgeous wheels and remarkable paintjob on the front grill. The rubber side mirrors are totally unbreakable but not always straight though.